Steve McIntyre notes what he calls an ideological construct. It is the rationalize of an effective opposition as being in the grips of moneyed interests.

As readers know, this characterization of Climate Audit and other critical climate blogs (WUWT, Jeff Id, Lucia, Bishop Hill) is total fantasy on the part of the climate science community. It seems to me that the fantasy is an ideological construct that they use to avoid looking into the mirror.

The reason McIntyre considers it a fantasy is that the major players he names are all independent, retired, avocational, or academic. That sort of thing does not make any impact as can be seen the depths to which they will go to make some link, any link, between these irritating skeptics and ‘big oil’ or other corrupt influence.

It is a hallmark, this ideological construct, that can be easily seen. That means it is also a good metric for determining that an ideology has over-run reality and reason.